FAQs

A therapy session is usually face to face or via Telehealth, and is approximately 60 minutes. Our therapy sessions are only for individuals, not couples or families. You can expect to be treated with care and feel safe in a quiet and comfortable room. It is beneficial to come for at least 3 sessions to get a feel for it and decide if therapy is what you are looking for or if you feel comfortable seeing me. Your therapy sessions are usually fortnightly.

Essentially, you can have as many therapy sessions as you need and can afford! Particularly, if you don’t have a Mental Health Care Plan. If your General Practitioner has referred you with a Mental Health Care Plan then you are entitled with rebated sessions of up to 10 per calendar year.

You do not have to obtain a Mental Health Care Plan in order to see us. However, a Mental Health Care Plan gives you a Medicare rebate that contributes $81.90 towards the full session fee. This makes it relatively affordable for many people. Currently, Medicare allows you a maximum of 10 rebate sessions per calendar year.

For more detailed information about Medicare policy click here.

Yes you can! With us you can receive a Medicare rebate of $81.90 after the completion of each session. The full fee needs to be paid before your rebate is processed. We typically handle of this for you as long as you have a valid Mental Health Care Plan.

Don’t worry, you can still keep seeing us even when you’ve used up all the sessions. It means that you will pay for each session you attend (with no rebate). Just like paying for a Personal Trainer, we am here to help you achieve your goals until you feel confident to stand on your own two feet. Some people have arranged monthly or bi-monthly sessions as a ‘check-in’ to make sure they continue to stay on track. Please see the fee (with no Mental Health Care Plan) listed above.

Absolutely! Confidentiality is one of the most important aspects to psychological therapy because it allows you to feel safe with the knowledge that all that is said in the session stays in the room. We treat your personal privacy very seriously and do not share any of it with anybody. However, the confidentiality has its limitations when there are concerns relating to your personal safety or concerns that either you or others are at risk of harm. Our duty of care to you and others are part of our ethical responsibilities. More information about this is explained during your first consultation with us.

Your session time is set aside especially for you when you make each booking. That is why we ask that you provide more than 3 business days notice if you need to cancel or reschedule. This allows time to book in someone else who might be waiting to see us. However, if you cancel in under the requested timeframe it is unlikely that at short notice someone else can be fitted in. That is why there is a late cancellation fee of $90 which will need to be paid before you make another booking. Also, not showing up to your booked session will incur the charge of a full session fee. We will attempt to contact you on the same day but if there is no response within 2 business days we will not continue to call. You are always welcome to make another booking with us at any time in the future.

Please note that if you arrive late to your session it will still end at the predetermined time and not be extended.

You can refer yourself or be referred by a health professional or any other person who is working with you. If you are a General Practitioner and have completed a Mental Health Care Plan for your patient then please send it directly to us and we will contact your patient. Please click here to get in touch.

We resonate with the need to have spontaneous communication with someone you trust and have developed therapeutic trusting relationship. However, for counselling to be effective, meaningful, and safe, special boundaries are put in place to serve you and us. This sounds quite different to our everyday social relationships. What do these boundaries look like?

For example, we would be asking you to ‘hold the tension’ between our sessions and allow yourself to sit with the thoughts, questions, and reflections. Write them in a journal and bring them to our next session. It could make quite a dynamic session as we discuss your in-between thoughts.

You ultimately deserve a therapeutic space that is free of bias, judgement, and ‘contained’. This container is essentially our ability to draw a boundary and allows us to discuss some of your most personal and sensitive information. So, if we are also seeing one of your family members or friends the therapeutic containment will effectively begin to lose its quality. Sometimes this cannot be helped and ends up purely coincidental and will be discussed with the parties accordingly. However, if there is pre-knowledge that we are already seeing or have seen your family member, we will not be able to commence counselling with you.

You may not always gel with the person you’re seeing, including us. Our priority is to help you along your counselling journey so if you’re not comfortable with us for whatever reason it is OKAY to stop seeing us. You do not have to tell us all the reasons why too. We will always do our best to meet your psychological needs but we’re also realistic about our limitations. We too am human and not everybody is going to like who we are or our style of counselling. It is also our job to check in with you and find out if things are working out for you. It is important to us that we help you find alternative avenues which would better suit your needs.

You should always be able to choose who you see. However, seeing more than one counsellor or psychologist at the same time is not advisable. This is because engaging in counselling is a therapeutic investment not only for you but also for us. It involves time and psychological energy to create a healthy therapeutic relationship. Seeing more than one therapist or changing therapist frequently actually does not help you move forward and instead leaves you with more disappointment. We would recommend that you take the time to assess if the person you’re seeing is suited to your needs, and then make the choice to continue or not.